


They're Just Battle Cries Dear

by ABookishSortOfLover (qwerty28274)



Series: International Fanworks Day [6]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: (I guess?) - Freeform, (and following), (kind of?), (sort of lmao), Body Dysmorphia, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, M/M, Songfic, Spoilers for Episode: e051-057 The Suffering Game Parts 1-7, all of these tags are just me guessing guys i haven't written in so long i don't know anymore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-18 00:48:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29480940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qwerty28274/pseuds/ABookishSortOfLover
Summary: It's hard, when you've grown so used to having nothing, realizing that you're beginning to lose your grip on one of the few things you've had all along.
Relationships: Kravitz/Taako (The Adventure Zone)
Series: International Fanworks Day [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/408550
Comments: 1
Kudos: 13





	They're Just Battle Cries Dear

**Author's Note:**

> It's International Fanworks Day! I just finished the Balance campaign of TAZ and I cried like a big old baby at the end, it was So good and Griffin is So good at storytelling, I don't have the words for how much that campaign meant to me, so here's my tribute to that on a fanfic writer's favorite holiday of the year.

Sometimes Taako forgot what he looked like now. It wasn’t like the spell he used to hide his true appearance took very much effort to maintain, not after the decades he’d spent perfecting it.

It did slip sometimes, if he wasn’t careful. If it had been an exhausting day, and the years’ long habit slipped his mind as he collapsed into bed, stone of farspeech never far from reach, that connection to Merle and Magnus, and even the rest of their group of seven, not something he would part with for the world, not for anything.

It was those mornings after, and every once in a while Kravitz would be there with him, when he would wake up, and something would be _just_ wrong, just this side of perfect, and for the life of him he couldn’t figure out what it was. There was a routine on those mornings, when he would slip from his boyfriend’s arms, not too cold after a night of cuddling, just by virtue of… what was that science-y word? Diffusion? Osmosis? It didn’t matter, he could ask Angus if he really cared. Then he would drift around the room, wandering from place to place trying to find the source of that _off_ feeling. Eventually he would make it to the bathroom, to the mirror, and then, like remembering a bad dream, everying would click into place again. He didn’t… look right anymore. He almost… Wasn’t _him_.

He always took a moment, on those mornings, cataloguing his own face, noticing the slightly faded freckles, how his eyes were just not as _bright_ anymore. The beginnings of bags under his eyes, the way his face just looked _wrong_. It was worse, he thought, ever since the Day of Story and Song, because as hard as it was, not looking like himself anymore, as infuriating as it still was that Lucretia had made him forget his _own twin sister_ , at least when he’d forgotten about Lup, he didn’t know that he didn’t look like her anymore.

That wasn’t a feeling he could express to anyone else, not even to Lup, because he didn’t think she would quite get it. She’d always been insistent on finding the differences between their faces - pointing out the three freckles they didn’t have in common, the way the tip of her left ear was just slightly less pointy than the one on her right, the flecks of gold in his eyes that she didn’t have. She wouldn’t _get it_. Because the one thing that he’d always had, if he didn’t have Lup, when he _remembered_ that he didn’t have Lup, was their face.

Something else he’d been noticing, as centuries passed, was that he was aging ever so slightly faster than his sister. He was getting, _ugh_ , wrinkles, just starting to form at the edges of his eyes, smile lines beginning to mark his face...

He hated it.

Some people aged gracefully, like the way Kravitz had always had the beginnings of a silver fox thing going on, or the way it had been so gradual for Mangus - the glasses he’d started to need suited him surprisingly well as it turned out. Shit, even Lucretia had always had _something_ about her that just made age look good on her, it suited her, looking wiser than the rest of them. Merle didn’t count, he just looked old.

Graceful wasn’t the word Taako would use for the way he was aging. _Tragic_ was probably more apt. The last few years, whenever he had one of these mornings, as he faced himself in the mirror, he instinctively frowned. This _sucked_.

Kravitz found him on one of those mornings, happening to stop by in the morning, coming to surprise Taako with a brunch date because it had been a couple days since they’d seen each other. He appeared in the bedroom, where he assumed the elf would be, since he was prone to sleeping in unless absolutely necessary; but he wasn’t there. So, he drifted through the house, stopping first in the kitchen, frowning when he couldn’t find Taako, then to the bathroom, where the door was open, and as he approached silently, the other was making faces at himself in the mirror, usually frustration, and seeming to get more and more upset as his eyes scanned his own face.

Taako was so engrossed in looking at himself, fingers itching to pinch and pull to make the wrinkles go away, to right his appearance, but wanting to make sure he _knew_ what he looked like, that he didn’t even notice Kravtiz creeping up on him until a cool hand rested on his hip, causing him to yelp and whirl around, hurriedly casting his spell, banishing that _wrong_ face as quickly as possible.

Kravitz’s eyebrows furrowed as a nearly imperceptable change swept over Taako’s face, miniscule differences taking over features he was only slightly less familiar with, replacing them with the version of Taako he usually saw, the one that he showed the entire world. “Taako…”

“What’s up my dude? What brings you here on this fine morning?” His face lit up, and he leaned into the hand that rose to cup his face, warming just slightly as it came into contact with his skin. “Usually if you’re here this early it’s because you spent the night, did I miss something important?”

Kravitz laughed softly, shaking his head. “No, I just wanted to come by, take you to brunch if you wanted.”

“Well then good, let’s go to brunch!” He turned towards the mirror, grabbing a makeup bag and beginning to apply, attention again turned to his own face as he decided just what he wanted to do today. “They just opened a new place on the west side of town, they’re supposed to have this _beautiful_ marmalade for their french toast, I’ve been dying to try it out and-”

“Taako.”

The elf looked up, their eyes meeting in the mirror, his heart clenching at the sorrow in his lover’s eyes. “Yeah, babe, what’s up?”

“You know…” He pursed his lips, hesitating. “You know that you don’t have to hide from me right? I know… it’s not like I forgot about what happened to you in Wonderland. It doesn’t… change anything. At all.”

Taako forced a laugh and turned back to the mascara he’d started to apply, making the Face in the mirror. “Of course, dude. You think I put all this effort into looking good for _you_?”

“Well then… what do you do it for?”

“For my fans, of course. I’ve got a public image to uphold babe, I can’t just go changing up my face on everyone willy nilly.” There was a hand on his shoulder, and as a lump started to form in his throat, Taako suddenly couldn’t even hold eye contact with himself in the mirror, much less with his boyfriend, despite the comforting presence at his back. It was… different, he thought. He’d joked about not caring what Kravitz thought about the whole thing, at first, because of the skeletal form he sometimes appeared in, but his boyfriend was. Astoundingly hot, no matter what his form, frankly, and he _was_ telling the truth. The beauty spell wasn’t for Kravtiz’s benefit. Kravitz wasn’t the one who would look in the mirror and fail to recognize himself at least once every five years.

“Can, uh. Taako, can I see you? The real you, I mean. You never… I never get to see what you really look like, and… I want to.”

Taako grit his teeth as he felt his eyes start to fill with tears, exasperation filling his lungs. “Why?” He spun back towards Kravtiz, breath hitching as the man was closer behind him than he’d thought, his handsome, _perfect_ face close enough to kiss. “Why do you want to see when I look… wrong? I look _awful_ , I’m starting to get wrinkles, and my freckles are fading, and-”

Kravtiz carefully took Taako’s face in his hands, placing a gentle kiss on the elf’s forehead, tucking the other into his chest as tears started to spill from his eyes. “Because you, Taako, are the love of… well, my life. Because I want to know what you really look like underneath the shields you put up, because it will not change a single thing about how I feel about you, and because I don’t want you to feel as though you have to hide a single thing about yourself from me.”

“It’s not… darling, it’s not _you_ I’m hiding from.” He wiped his eyes, turned to see if his mascara had run, and pulled a face in the mirror. The hand still on his shoulder rubbed soothingly, and he took a deep breath, turning back to those big brown eyes and letting the breath out slowly as he let the spell drop.

A small, soft smile stole across Kravitz’s face, dropping slightly as Taako began to explain what he’d been struggling with for the past few centuries as he stared at this face that was becoming less and less recognizable as his own, even if it was only in ways that he would notice. He stroked a thumb across the other’s high cheekbone, eyes squinting thoughtfully as he took in the minute differences between the face in front of him, and the one he saw every other time he saw Taako. “You know. A great bard once wrote a song. A very good song, might I add, I think you might enjoy it. The chorus goes, _‘these lines aren’t wrinkles, dear heart. They’re just dollops of paint on a new work of art. And as I walk away I know that I’ve been through the wars, and that creaking you hear in my bones, it’s not pain, it’s applause.’_ You and the rest of your party, you’ve all gotten your fair share of battle wounds and scars, I think.”

“Well, yeah, but those all up your sexiness percentage by like at least fifteen percent per instance. It’s defo not the same thing, my dude.” A watery half-laugh, and a rueful smile as Taako burrowed into Kravtiz’s chest, arms wrapped tight around his middle. Yes, he was being purposefully difficult and belligerent, but sometimes you just can’t face things head-on. Sometimes you have to step around the problem in order to stand on top of it. And it sucks, it always sucks. But you have to start conquering things somewhere.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! If you liked it, please fuel my zombie writer brain with kudos and comments!
> 
> If you wanna talk about fandom things (or anything, really) come give me a nudge on my Tumblr! It's [thepotatowrites](http://thepotatowrites.tumblr.com)


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